Hey guys.As most of us have, I read Baten's Mistweaver Monk guide when starting out with the class/spec, and it was really helpful. Although, the more experienced I became, the more in-depth questions were thrown up, that couldn't be answered by the guide. So I went through this forums, asked questions and talked to a lot of people, to collect the following additions to give his guide more depth and detail. Feel free to comment, if you have anything else to mention, change or add.

Notes: This is EXCLUSIVELY for arena. There might be different choices for RBGs, World PvP and, obviously, PvE.

Race:UD for horde, NElf for alliance, you need any form of CC breaking/preventing you can get as a MW monk.

Talents:- Tiger's Lust- Chi Wave (There is a current trend going on, replacing Crit with Haste as your main stat, focusing more on Surging Mist and HoTs, than Healing Spheres. Should you choose to try this playstyle, Zen Sphere would be better)- Chi Brew- Leg Sweep (This is a no-brainer for 2s vs Melee/DpS comps, where you will need as much CC on the enemy healer as possible to score a kill. For 3s, Ring of Peace is also an option, depending on if your comp will allow you to overextend for leg sweep, and depending on if there are already too many stuns from your mates that would DR leg sweep)- Healing Elixirs (Although generally, this is seen as the best choice atm, I still feel uncomfortable with it, because it requires you to either hold back brews/teas for when you could benefit from the heal, or waste the heal on certain occassions...)- Convoke Xuen, the white tiger (Most people use Chi Torpedo afaik, I think with the 5.4 changes, and the Xuen pet bar, I really like using it to eat Hunter traps)

Healing style:Spamming Healing Spheres under your enemy team's target, while keeping your tier 2 talent & expel harm on CD, and keeping Enveloping Mist and Renewing Mist up, Surging Mist only pre-emptively, should one of your mates have to los you. As mentioned earlier, some people are trying to go for Haste and a Surging Mist-based healing style. Although I still think spheres are better, only time will be able to tell, feel free to share any experience you have regarding this topic.

Gearing:You want spirit & crit on all of your items. Choose the items you buy from the vendor, and the reforging accordingly. You should also gem for crit, while matching socket bonuses. This will leave you with mostly Int/Crit in red sockets, Crit in yellow ones and Crit/Spirit in blue ones. Best metagame would be the Revitalizing Primal Diamond or Tyrannical one. The 2nd trinket (for non-humans) is personal preference imo, I'm gonna use a Battlemaster trinket to have another little HP boost during blanket silences while being trained. Again, if you have any math or experiences that you want to share about this, do so in the comments please Additionally, something a lot of people aren't considering, is that we have access to both, the caster mace and sword, who are 1,6 and 2,6 weapon speed accordingly, with the same stats and average dps though. As there will be situations where we can actually provide supporting melee dps (and therefore, hps through Eminence and Serpent's Zeal), you should make this a conscious decision. If I'm not mistaken here, the following things should apply:- As weapon damage is normalized with special attacks, the choice of weapon speed should not have any influence on your damage with Jab, Blackout-Kick and Tiger's Claw (and respectively, your healing from Eminence).- For autoattacks though, who admittedly only have marginal influence, but after all, some people, including me, want to min/max their chars, it looks a little different. In PvE or on dummies you'll have close to 100% uptime on your target, in which case the weapon speed should eventually equal itself out. In PvP though, even melee dps have nowhere near 100% uptime, and most definitely not healers, who will have to overextend to do so. So since you're gonna have only a few moments of uptime, the choice comes down to: More hits per second uptime for less healing per hit vs Less hits per second uptime for more healing per hit. Since you get an "opening hit" when starting melee attacks, I think the slower weapon (sword/mageblade) will be more beneficial for mistweaver monks, as it provides more "burst" healing. Something else to notice here though, is the fact that a fast weapon will provide more pushback when meleeing a caster. Again, everyone who can bring some clarity here, please do so

Comps: MW Monks are mostly suited to play with rather slow moving classes like DKs, Shadow Priests, Eles and Locks, since it's a lot easier to hit them with spheres. It's also beneficial to play with classes that can get you out of CC, or reliably stop it.

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I hope I was able to help some people that had the same questions as I did. Full credit goes out to people like Primius, Shridevi and Enimos, who made me able to sum this up

So if you were to suddenly move 1600 of crit gems to 800 of int, you'd also need spirit to make up for the crit, which means you're actually turning 1400 crit into 663 int, which is questionable. If you end up moving large amounts of crit though, crit becomes > int.

So with our current gear I wouldn't go below 17-18% crit. To complicate things more, it depends on the comp. To get 5% crit you need to play with mage, WW, feral, or hunter with wolf, none of them are very likely. So in that case int is better since 5% int is multiplicative, unless you're getting spam purged, in which case crit is better.

Btw, orbs always heal more with int, and crit will give 0 mp5 if you spam orbs.

It sort of comes down to how you wish to play. I don't like using mana tea more often since sometimes it can't be used (CC, burst) and it limits mobility. Spirit is reliable, and crit can overheal, and that premise isn't accounted for with the PVE MW calculator [http://www.temerityo...aver/calc.html] . I'd rather stack int/spirit even though I'm stacking crit atm.

Then there is haste which is a valid point, more-so in 5s/rbgs. A year ago haste was worthless and blizz added 50% haste benefit to serpent stance. So we actually get a very decent GCD reduction from more haste. In order for the 6145 tiger stance cap to be worth it though you need 5% haste buff and need to rely on enveloping mists, soothing, ReM. You calculate it by 1.5 - your haste %. So 27.76% haste (6141 +5%haste buff) = 1.22 GCD compared to 1.33 GCD 16.65% haste (3145 +5%). So relatively you have 8.3% faster GCD compared to 3145 haste. It's noticeable since if you drink mana tea and spam next ability you only get 1 tea off compared to 2. However, similarly when moving crit -> int, you need spirit to make up for the lost crit, which means adding 3k haste comes at a 584 spirit cost, and then you need to gem that spirit, wasting even more stats. More spirit/haste come automatically as we upgrade gear, so I'm waiting.

Haste doesn't reduce spell MW CDs as far as I know so actually you cast orbs at the same speed but they do less healing since haste has no benefit. Surging mist is faster since it's the GCD, not spell CD. So you're really relying on ReM, soothing, enveloping, some surging for burst, and the basis is channeling. So then you use Zen Sphere since purging env would be detrimental, and suddenly you're using 3 spells (ReM soothing zen) which benefit a lot from mastery, so you think about stacking haste/mastery.

So all the options are interesting and affect your playstyle. Really though there's not a huge difference, maybe 4% extra healing you can squeeze out. The main problem is that MWs are terrible at the moment, haha.

I have tried all three stat builds and regardless of what many say there just isn't much difference between them. You pretty much decide your heal style, and gear according to that.

I am running haste/spirit now running mage/warrior/mw and we made it to 2050 last night then got farmed down to 1930 /sigh. We probably should have stopped queuing because we were facing teams with one to three glads on them, and the same 3-4 teams, and we were being counter comp the last 1hr30mins of the night.

Haste/Spirit is fun, and it allows for better buffering of the mage so I actually can burst him up with orbs. The main problem I have been having is keeping the mage up is incredibly difficult with orbs, and one CC and he can easily die from full health to dead in few seconds. I can't really tell him "Don't move" like I would do with a lock or ele because the few times I have done that he has gone splat.

Watching us get our asses kicked last night by Holy Paladin/Mage/Warrior, and RDruid/Mage/Warrior really made me see just how lacking this spec is.

Paladin has incredible CC, and two BoPs and Sacs for his mage. Druid has incredible CC, and significant damage reduction, and HoT buffering.

We have life cocoon =/.

If improves don't happen in the mid season patch I doubt I will be able to stick with this spec much longer. Mage that I been playing with decided last night that he doesn't want to run this comp anymore with a MW because I don't have the cooldowns to save him when CC happens, compared to other healers like paladin and druids.